Faculty Professional Development
In a relatively short period of time, begun under a period of pandemic crisis, Academic Transformation has massively and positively impacted the opportunities for faculty to engage self-paced training and skill acquisition, allowing them to acquire critical skills according to their own diverse and extremely busy schedules. These resources are now permanently open and available to all faculty at their convenience.
The Faculty Hub was created with the assistance of the prestigious training organization, iDesign, and provides a wealth of self-paced resources for faculty to explore, covering everything from curriculum design to deep pedagogical debates.
The Blackboard "Crash Course" is a short two-day seminar that acquaints faculty with BSU’s 7 Core Essentials for Blackboard courses and how to ensure those essentials are in place before the start of a term.
We also offer a permanent training program through Academic Computing entitled “Getting Started with Blackboard – Virtual Campus Edition Fall 2021”; it is self-paced and the content is equivalent to LOTTO I.
For faculty who feel their skills are in between the university’s two traditional levels of online training (called LOTTO I and LOTTO II), we offer LOTTO-STEP, which is again self-paced and permanently open.
Do not forget the long-existing and extremely thorough resources available online and free for college and university faculty about Blackboard through Blackboard itself. This resource allows you to type in whatever keywords are of concern and this will connect you to extremely explicit and helpful short video tutorials that act as walk-throughs for technology, curriculum design, and extra tools.
Also, please be reminded that the addition in 2021 of the EasySoft program within Blackboard means that all faculty members, when they are actually in their courses, have access to a pop-up help assistant (AI-based) that will connect faculty to helpful articles, resources, and how-tos directly connected to the area of the course their cursor is hovering over. In other words, faculty have permanent access to targeted helpdesk-like assistance while they are in their actual courses.